Who’s advancing? Announcing the top 16 countries of the waze worldcup

Alrighty guys, the first part of the competition has come to a close and we’re now entering phase B. Road goodies will be removed from the maps of the countries who didn’t make the cut and those in the final 16 will start all over from scratch. In fact, we spent all night sweeping up all of the old balls in your country and fully redistributing them, so it’s really anyone’s game…

And as you know, on July 4th, we’ll make the cut again and the final four will begin - so do your part to make sure your country gets there! Tell your friends to download waze and munch road goodies on their commute and let them know that even one ball will enter them into the raffle for an iPad, should your country win.

Here are the countries that are advancing to the next level – not in alphabetical order! :-)

Svache, you are right, only the top 11 are counted so that countries that have more users will not have a clear advantage over those with small. If we didn't do that the US or Italy who have most users would have won easily.

While I agree there should be something to make it fair for all countries, that actually gives a slight advantage to countries with less active users... If I want to be in the top 11 I have to fight over the balls in my area with several others - meaning we all get fewer, whereas less active users means more balls for the ones who are active. Not that I'm in a particularly active area, I'm just saying... a lower average score means it's harder to get a high score.

Having said that, it's tough enough for me to grab a few extras without my wife complaining.

Bigfry - in addition to counting the top 11 we've also distributed balls in a ratio that's proportionate to the number of active users in the county. So every user can potentially go after the same number of ball as in other countries. Which country are you playing for?

I agree with Bigfry. The distribution of balls seems not to be so balanced. According to the stats, german wazers averaged 17.66 balls each (all users), italians 6.50, israeli 2.60 and so on.I think it's hard to explain this huge difference just by saying that average german wazer is 8 times "hungrier" than average israeli user :)Anyway, nice competition! I wish for some more in the future!

@Alex, like you said, it is averaged over all users... so that means if someone just grabs one ball because he/she drives over it, without actually actively participating, that this user is still counted in the average balls each. If you have a 100 more users like this user in a country than in the next country, then that country automatically also has a lower average.

Svache, we're talking about large amounts of people (thousands of wazers). The percentage of "1 ball users" must be, more or less, the same in the different countries. For large numbers, for me it's difficult to justifie such a dramatic difference of averages between countries.I'm sorry, it's quite hard for me to explain myself in english...

I agree, this distribution seems quite biased toward the countries with a smaller user base.

In my area there are quite a few soccer balls after the refresh, but there are also quite a few other wazers. Consequently I have only munched half a dozen or so... when I suspect that I would have grabbed quite a bit more had I been the only one.

In places where there are fewer wazers, it seems quite likely that there would be many places where there are only one or two wazers in the general vicinity. It would be much easier for those one or two wazers to pick up a larger number of soccer balls and that would increase their likelihood of making it into the top 11.

That being said, I understand the difficulty of making a competition between different sized user bases like this "fair"... I don't think that there is really any foolproof formula.